Is there a 2.72 equivalent to 'no caustics'?
It looks like this option was changed a bit. You can enable/disable caustics from reflections and from refraction (when light goes through transparent materials) separatly.

Just disable "Reflective Caustics" and "Refractive Caustics" in the Light Paths tab of the render settings.



UPDATE:

It seems that these settings do not work if you are using Branched Path Tracing. You can however play around with the Clamp Indirect value to trunkate high light values produced by reflected light.